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From My Flickr

December 10, 2008

One fine morning about 100 passengers checked in the Berlin Schoenefeld airport for their Ryan Air flight to London Stansted and were waiting in the boarding lounge. All of a sudden they were asked to vacate the lounge. The immigration police were one the job to reverse the process of immigration and the passengers were wondering why. After a while they realized that the flight was cancelled and this was the reason.

I was one of them. And I had to reach London that day to be able to appear at my exam the next day. After some tensed hours of waiting in queue in front of the ticket desk trying to find out what to do next and the horror of finding that no flights were available in the day, purchasing a new ticket (thanks God the laptop was with me), hours spent in train/bus to reach the other end of the city with all the luggage to board a British Airways flight. By the time I reached in the evening to my destination in London finishing with hours of tube journey I was completely exhausted and almost sick. But at the end of the day I felt that I was lucky to be able to make it.

London is cold, battered with a weak pound but has not lost its usual colors beaming with hope and its wealth of multi-culturism. I framed a shot in my mind while I was in a tube today going towards London Bridge: a few hands clutching on a rod in the packed tube, a few faces moving in and out of the frame; dark, brown, white, Asian, Caucasian, African, young, aged, male, female. This is what I miss in Berlin.